James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 14, 2013
COMMENT:
A number of readers have been disappointed that I did not elaborate on the references made to my other works that bear on the subject at hand. As one reader put it, "I read these pieces and didn't need a rehash. But the reason I'm writing is that a lot of the ideas expressed here have been expressed in your books going back to Work Without Managers, right?" Actually, I have never written about millennials, per se, but have written about social, cultural and economic trends vis-à-vis workers and managers. With that in mind, I've expanded on the premises expressed here.
* * *
Claire McNeill, about to graduate from university, has
written an interesting Op Ed piece (Tampa Bay Times, 6/14/13) titled “My
digital generation adapts and pushes on.”
She writes:
“I’m a millennial according to the label that pegs us for
those of us born from the 1980s to the late ‘90’s. My reputation precedes me, apocalyptic
tales of my attention generation abound. We’re narcissistic and disaffected, reeking of
entitlements. A legion of Peter Pans,
we’re complacent in our dead-end temp jobs, squatting in our parents’
basements. We’ve been spoiled by our
helicopter parents and coddled with trophies received for every tiny
achievement – or just for showing up.
We’re Pavlov’s dog, raised on instant gratification or social
media. We don’t know what bootstraps
are, all 80 million of us.”
She goes on to say these criticisms ring hollow from where
she stands, but as I hope to show this is not necessarily so. She goes on to say her generation is
optimistic --- what American generation hasn’t been despite dire
circumstances? Optimism is both a blessing and a curse to Americans. It is one reason our leaders lead from behind. They hope for the best with the emphasis on hope and have little courage or inclination to take risks to upset that fixation on optimism, that is, until events come crashing in and make it impossible to do otherwise. In a way, the Digital Generation is the personification of this optimism and engagement style.
Then she argues quite lucidly the fact that “we are true
digital natives." That cannot be disputed but she says it as if it implies that being a "digital native" is an uncontested good thing. Truth being known we don't know and therefore cannot argue the point with any credible confidence.
“The Internet is something we live alongside,” which again I think is
true. While she sees the cost benefits
quite clearly, I confess to being wearier.
Obviously, her generation has left the baby boomers television
generation behind as her reality and reality television are intertwined.
Ms. McNeill’s generation Is Tom Friedman’s “the world is
flat” with global markets, blurring demographic, cultural and national boundaries, indeed,
nationalism itself. “My generation will
be the most racially and ethnically integrated of all time.” If this alone proves true, it could become
the greatest generation in the history of man as we, at last, would be by
definition a human and hopefully humane race. But does she believe civil society will truly become civilized, and that war and terror will perish while social justice will pervade the planet? I don't think so.
Evidence that this young lady has her head screwed on
properly is that she sees her
generation intuitively engaged in incessant change with no inclination to retreat from it. On the other hand, she sees the same
anxiety-driven questions with which to grapple and a similar sense of an identity crisis. When being authentic is more a matter of what others think of you than what you think of yourself, identity and anxiety are always challenging (see Meet Your New Best Friend 2013).
She also admits
several college trained friends are treading water, some waiting instead of
doing something to change the momentum.
She correctly calls these individuals “slackers.” But she sees most engaged while gritting
their teeth, volunteering, networking, adapting to the reality of the
situation, taking the initiative and “pushing on.” If ten percent of the millennials are like
her, Pitrim Sorokin’s “Ideational Culture” will surely materialized, but before
calling for a parade, let us look at this a little more in depth.
Time’s columnist Joel Stein, 41, misses being a member of this
generation by about a decade. But it is
clear that he wears their colors (“The New Greatest Generation: Why Millennials
Will Save Us All, Time,” 5/20/13). What
is interesting about Stein’s complementary and complimentary piece to Ms. McNeill’s
is that his waltzes through data expressed elsewhere (see “An Open Letter to
Young Professionals,” The Peripatetic Philosopher, 6/12/13) while doing a good
job of outlining the possible challenges ahead:
(1) Millennials aren’t trying to take over the Establishment; they’re growing up without one. IF this is true, and there is little doubt that it is, at 80 million strong, they are still only a quarter of the American population.
(2)
Millennials,
while lacking face-to-face empathy, know how to turn themselves into a brand. They self-advertise on some social media with
scores sometimes hundreds of “friends” and “followers.” This inclination is seen by University of
Georgia psychologists as the equivalent of inflating their balloon on such social
networks as Facebook.
(3)
Millennials
define who they are as personality types by the age of 14, whereas earlier
generations were unsure who they were until in their 30s. Growing up on reality television, which
is basically documentaries of personality types, is credited for this development.
(4)
Millennials, rich or poor, think and behave
the way rich kids have always behaved. That
is why they are the first generation of teenagers that is not into rebelling. They are not even sullen. As one person of this generation confesses,
“I grew up watching Peanuts. MTV was a
parent free zone. MTV president Stephen
Friedman says of his reality shows, “My audience outsources its superego to
their parents.”
(5)
Millennials
love the business culture and all that it represents and celebrities as
well. Previous generations were
suspect of business and kept celebrity at arm’s length.
(6)
Millennials
are not cowed by power. They see
themselves as part of the power curve and embrace celebrity with all its
connotations. Institutional authority is
leveraged without hesitation to negotiate better contracts. Position power is neither intimidating nor
mesmerizing but only something to engage.
(7)
Millennials
are not true believers or into counterculture because for them there is no
culture. There is no “us versus them” mentality. This is yet another reason why millennials
don’t think in terms of rebellion.
(8)
Millennials
have experienced President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Great Recession of
2008, and the Arab Spring. They look to
winter of their lives optimistically on a personal and professional level.
(9)
Millennials
have no interest in aborting “the system,” but choose instead to embrace
it. They are pragmatic idealists
instead of causal idealists. They are tinkerers
rather than dreamers; life hackers rather than life strategists. What you see is not only what you get, from
their point of view, that is all there is.
(10)
Millennials
are comfortable in a world without leaders or leadership. They don’t consider them relevant or
necessary; the same is true of managers.
From their perspective, the world is flat and to be engaged without
installing interferences. The focus is
on their interests, only, with leaders and managers treated as if poster board intrusions. That explains why the “Occupy Wall Street” and
Arab Spring in Tahir Square in Egypt fizzled out. They are not into rebellion or a cohesive
attack on their frustrations. They are
only interested in giving notice as to what they are, which is a new
phenomenon. They are not planners or
activists. They are the ultimate
conclusion to Pacifier Nation.
(11)
Millennials
need constant approval. They post
pictures on their mobiles while trying on clothes; they have massive fears of
missing out or not being included; they are more interested in themselves than
in anyone else, but need the approval of others so they can in turn approve of
themselves (re: see Meet Your New Best Friend, 2013).
(12)
Millennials
are celebrity obsessed, but don’t idolize celebrities. They see celebrities “just like us!” As with celebrities, everything with them is
context not content. Content is a
running theme without a beginning, middle or end, or necessarily a plot.
(13)
Millennials
are not likely to be churchgoers, even though they believe in God, because they
don’t identify with big institutions, religious or otherwise. Earlier generations with such a mindset
would want to change the religious, educational, governmental or political
system to better reflect their ideas and ideals. This is not so with millennials. They have no trouble with them being as they
are as long as they don’t take their mobiles away.
(14)
Millennials
could best be described as being cool about everything, but not passionate
about anything. They are informed but not
palpably transactional or transformational in the sense of being interested in changing
or even disturbing the status quo, again, as long as it doesn’t disturb their
modus operandi.
(15)
Millennials
are pro-business and financially responsible.
They have less credit card debt than any other previous generation
since the era of credit cards. This is
in part because they may live at home and use their parents’ credit cards. That said they do have $1.1 trillion in
school loan debt.
(16)
Millennials
are not shy; they are comfortable in front of a camera; they can talk
intelligently in sound bites, but perception in a personal sense is still
everything. Proof of this is that the
average 17-year-old has more images on Facebook than a 17th century
French king had of himself in his lifetime
Joel Stein’s piece in the Time’s, to his credit, lays out
some of the factors with which observers over the past thirty plus years have
registered concern. The late Christopher
Lasch wrote a series of book on the subject commencing with “The Culture of
Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) and “The
Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984), among them.
Should you read these books, studies written before the
Information Age took hold, you would find that Lasch anticipated that what I
call “the Pacifier Generation,” would in time materialize. It is with us now. The mobile has become the replacement for the
plastic nipple that so much earlier had registered contentment, while freeze
framing millennials as if the center of their own universe in narcissistic delight
irrespective of the perturbations clamoring for their attention and
resolution. Studies indicate that:
(1) The incident of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that is now 65 years of age or older.
(2) 58 percent of college students scored higher on a narcissistic scale in 2009 than in 1982 (National Institute of Health).
(3) Millennials got so many participation trophies while growing up that a recent study showed that 40 percent believe they should be promoted every two years regardless of performance.
(4) Millennials are fame obsessed. Three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be personal assistants to famous people as want to be a United States Senator. This is the antithesis of delusions of grandeur for themselves, but rather an interest in being near glamour and power to benefit from the reflection.
(5)
According to a 2007 survey, four times as many
would pick the assistant job to as celebrity
over CEO of a major corporation.
(6)
Millennials are so convinced of their own
greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding
morality of 60 percent would feel right without any guiding principles or
outside authority. This nullifies the
role of the Church and organized religion as personal intercessor.
(7)
Millennials are stunted. More of them live with their parents who are
between the ages of 18 and 29 than live with a spouse outside their parent’s
home (Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults).
(8) Millennials are lazy. In 1992, 80 percent of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with great responsibility; in 2002, only 60 percent did (Families and Work Institute). They still want the perks and privileges that before were offered as incentives to performance. This has been described elsewhere as leading to workers being suspended in terminal adolescence (see Work Without Managers 1991). WWMs anticipated the decline and irrelevance of management in the conduct of business, but it didn’t anticipate the arrival of milennials as the Digital Generation. Millennials have become an exclamation point to the premise of this study.
(9)
Millennials cannot do simple math (adding,
subtracting, division, multiplication) in their heads; they need a calculator. Nor can millennials spell or construct
grammatical sentences without the Internet.
Their curiosity in both regards is skin deep as they rely on some
software for grammar and spell check as well as the thesaurus for the word that
they will use. The vocabulary in their
heads is limited, too, as they are not a reader generation.
(10)
Millennials at 80 million strong (born between
1980 and 2000) are the largest generation in American history. Baby boomers, who are now retiring, are not
far behind at 78 million. In an ironic
way, due to the abandonment of parenting requirements of baby boomers,
millennials have had the opportunity to be their own parents as well as the
inclination to create a world that best reflected their orientation and
mindset. They were into games as
children and now they are making life a game on another level. They justify their toys – devices of the
Information Age – as instruments of efficiency or tools, while showing little
interest or inclination to reflect on what was lost never to be experienced
again for what was gained.
(11)
Rich and poor are equally narcissistic,
materialistic, and technology addicted.
There is little indication that millennials see this as delimiting. The consequence of this paradox is that no generation
has been so focused as millennials on the present or less focused on history or
the past.
(12)
Self-esteem issues peak with each generation at
some point, but with millennials it has accidentally boosts their narcissistic preoccupation. Self and esteem have become an oxymoron as
verification of individual worth has ceased to be from inner direction but
almost entirely from outer verification.
(13)
Millennials believe hooking up or networking is
as important if not more important than actually developing individual talent. There is a sameness to postmodern existence
which the Television Age with its monolithic architecture of hearth and home, dress
and manners, and even layout of cities and towns has become even more so in the
Information Age and the common denominator of millennials.
Millennials are most likely to have a high degree of unmet expectations which the late Christopher Lasch anticipated nearly forty years ago (see Culture of Narcissism) with them escaping into the electronic case of their own making. Millennials don’t get angry, or make demands on the status quo, they simply lower their expectations and level of satisfaction and resigned themselves more or less to their fate.
(14)
Millennials have come of age in the era of the “quantified
self,” that is, it is not the quality of anything, friends included, but the
numbers, as they obsessively are recording and adding constantly to their data
base with the number of hits, etc.
(15) Millennials are text crazy sending and receiving a minimum of 88 per day. They are constantly waiting, wherever they are, for the buzz to tell them they have a message. It is the silence that is most threatening and the buzz that is most consoling.
(16)
Millennials live under the constant pressure and
influence of friends. “Peer pressure is
anti-intellectual, anti-historical and anti-eloquent” says Professor Mark
Bauerlein, Emory University. But this is
not new. Peer pressure has always been a
confounding phenomenon. What makes it
more so in this Digital Age is that anyone who does not have and is not slave
to a mobile is non compus mentis, or completely irrelevant. This mindset is more pervasive than racial,
religious, educational, political or social bias.
(17)
Millennials constant texting and tweeting is according
to Professor Larry Rosen of California State University, “doing a behavior to
reduce anxiety.” It is the Digital Age
pacifier surpassing Valium or cigarettes, booze or dope to register
contentment, so it isn’t all bad.
(18)
Millennials are not creative. The constant search for a hit of dopamine (“Someone
liked my latest textual update!”) increases contentment and satisfaction but reduces
creativity. From 1966 to the mid-1980s,
creativity scores in children increased.
They have been falling sharply since 1998 according to the Torrance
Tests of Creative Thinking. Millennials
argue look at all the advancement made practically every day in electronics and
their applications. Technology is
grounded in application, and application technology has been vigorous and
impressive. But the science, which is the
foundation and source of technology is old, very old in some instances
harkening back scores of years and beyond.
Look at art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy and psychology,
and you will see evidence that perfection has taken precedence over perspicacity.
(19)
In the era of social networking, largely through
an unnecessary face-to-face engagement, empathy scores have dropped and
narcissism scores have climbed.
Millennials have trouble intellectually understanding other’s with
differing points of view. It is outside
their normal orientation. Before they
were called the Digital Generation, they were referred to as the “spoiled brat
generation” by some writers (see Six Silent Killers, 2013).
On the heels of the Time report, we learn that in California
students with perfect attendance records at some inner city schools are
eligible for cars or iPads as rewards for perfect school attendance but not
necessarily with any requirement for improvement in school performance. This policy differs from school district to
school district, and the financing for these incentives is said to be completely
privately funded.
Nattering as we go, the interest here is to engage the
reader to see the possible impact in terms of transactional or transformational
benefit to society for the period. We
have had several generations named in the last century and a half. Transactional leadership pursues economic and
psychological contracts that meet the material and psychic needs of
society. Transformational leadership
recognizes the material and psychic transactional needs, but goes further to
transform the system to more effectively and efficiently meet those needs. Here are my most subjective designations::
(1) Missionary Generation (1860 – 1882) – transformational with Franklin Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryant
(2) The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900) – transactional with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scot Fitzgerald and James Joyce
(3) The Greatest Generation (1901 – 1924) – transformational with Betty Friedman, Ronald Reagan and WWII veterans
(4) The Silent Generation (1925 – 1942) – transactional with the Silent Majority and children of the Great Depression
(5) Baby Boomer Generation (1942 – 1960) – transactional with Oprah Winfrey and the Culture of Narcissism
(6) Generation X (1961 – 1980) – transactional with Jon Stewart and children who became their own parents
(7) The Millennials (1980 – 2000) – transformational with Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga
It is perhaps hard for millennials to understand why we give
them so much attention, but so little credence.
This is not new. We do this with for
every new generations. The only
difference with millennials, and this may prove significant, is that they don’t
seem to take the rest of us seriously, as they have had to be their own
parents, and now on their own, don’t feel they need us. For Joel Stein, “That’s why we’re scared of
them.”
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